


a glitch, a nosebleed

by phasmachinas



Series: goretober 2020 fills [3]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Psychic Bond, mild blood play, mind sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:22:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26828800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phasmachinas/pseuds/phasmachinas
Summary: She's hurt. Badly. (He's hurt. Badly.)The psychic link between The Doctor and The Master acts up, leading them to a forgotten place from their shared childhood.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Series: goretober 2020 fills [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951783
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	a glitch, a nosebleed

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for day 3 and 4 of goretober: glitch, nosebleed.
> 
> Takes place sometime after The Timeless Children.

She's hurt. Badly.

The certainty and the confusion of it hits her at once in a flare of pain and she crumbles unto herself, protecting her chest where she was hit and shouting for Yaz and Ryan and Graham to take cover.

But seconds tick and no signs of conflict follow. When she looks up, the meadow she was leading them through is still a meadow. When her hand comes away from her chest it isn't wet, isn't bloody, is whole.

The pain is gone as soon as it came, as if it was sucked from her.

The others are looking at her strangely when they come out of hiding. She doesn't remember what she tells them. And then they go on.

* * *

It happens again when she's alone in the TARDIS and she feels and hears a splintering that leaves her dizzy and has her looking at her arm and seeing a bloody sleeve that she doesn't recognize, a hand that she does and that she knows isn't and wasn't nor will be hers.

But before she can reach out the connection closes, the pain recedes, and all is silent.

* * *

And again. One minute she's warning her companions against eating rotten apples from the 1904 St. Louis orchard they're at and the next her vision is swimming.

It fills with ravines and a cliff and a cave, a green sky with two suns and a moon, with grass blowing in the wind of an unreachable planet she never knew outside of old books from the academia library, from daydreams with a long lost friend.

* * *

Her mind might be fractured, picked apart and cobbled hastily together from her run-in with the Matrix, broken enough for him to slip in the little cracks like he always belonged there, indiscernible from her, but now that she's caught the pattern it's obvious these memories of pain can't be hers.

They're too muted and too sudden to not be a second hand broadcast.

He's hurt. Badly.

She's not sure of the reason behind the sudden communications, he always refused help— most of all hers.

She sucks in her breath as another flare hits, as nausea comes and goes, as everything is too loud and suddenly too quiet.

If he's not willing to talk, then she will be the one to put a stop to it. She's never refused a call for help before, after all.

* * *

She doesn't lie to her fam, not really. When she tells them _Be right back_ she means it. The fact that chronologically it's been a week since then and she's decided to ride her convalescence alone is inconsequential. 

They'll be none the wiser. In the meantime she does her best to ignore how deafening the silence of their absence is.

* * *

Her loneliness travels through their fractured link like a piercing spear. He feels it like his, confuses it for his own all-consuming loneliness. Just like he saw a meadow and an orchard, just like he saw the inside of a TARDIS and a hand that he recognized as not his. Just as he filed them all as hallucinations.

* * *

She knows she's getting closer because reality melts around her. She will look up from the console and find herself staring at cave formations. She'll be in the void of space asking nebulae for directions and hear strange bird caws. She'll be pouring over old maps and smell burnt wood.

She'll feel his loneliness pinging back as well, but will know it immediately as not hers— the angry edge of it never had a place in her hearts.

* * *

The TARDIS stands out of place where she parks it, a dark square overlooking the coast.

She has to lay on the grass when she steps out, as if gravity were pulling her down. The nighttime sky is a dark green like a jewel, bespeckled with stars, reflecting on the ocean below. 

This is not a remote planet as much as it is an anomaly, more myth than factual. When they were children they daydreamed of making it their hideaway between adventures— because of course Time Lords will think of entire planets as their little forts. It can only be located if you are looking for it. Normal communications don't reach it.

She thought it was the first planet he would've destroyed.

Her vision shifts and the sounds she hears do too, torn between the place she is and somewhere further away. Confusion slips between the cracks of her thoughts, a hint of raw panic that's squashed.

The line goes dead and she stands, breaks into a full sprint down to the shore just as a dark figure starts its own sprint alongside it.

* * *

The chase doesn't last long. He's hurt and still bleeding and has never been the best runner of the two to begin with. This time she doesn't even have to tackle him: She yanks his arm and he yowls in pain, buckles, trips and she has to catch him. They both fall.

When he looks at her from the ground his eyes are wide and his mouth is a grimace, no manic grin on sight. It relents when recognition hits him. She feels his confusion and the flame of anger he always carries, pointed at her.

 **“You weren't expecting me.”** She mutters, hit with realization. **“Did you even know you were calling out to me?”**

 **“Come to gloat?”** He shoots back, once he collects himself. **“Came with your _I Told You So_ s before sending me to be locked up?”**

He keeps tugging at his arm. Her grip only turns more forceful and he winces.

**“I thought you were calling out for help, I thought—”**

He scoffs, and if disgust is plain on his face it doesn't make its way through the connection.

 **“And you came anyway? Didn't even think it might be a trap? Bless your bleeding, kind heart.”** He mocks.

**“Should've left you to your own devices then. See how you came out of this one by yourself.”**

His glare is an icy one when he spits out:

**“Wouldn't be the first time you left me to do just that.”**

And his rage reaches her. She lets go of his arm, throws back a glare and a snarl of her own, regrets every step she took to get here to his side, starts to get up.

But he reaches out and grabs the lapel of her coat and tugs her _down_. She has only a millisecond to wonder if what's under his nails is dried blood and if it's his before she instinctively reacts: she shoves him and just like that they're scuffling like they used to so long ago, except this time there's no one to tear them apart and send them to detention.

He throws sand in her eyes and she does the same, spits out whatever managed to land on her mouth. And in blindness they come together, shove, punch, slap, roll until they land on the shore and the coldness of the sea hits them both, bathes them, almost drowns them in their stubbornness until they drag each other out of its icy grip and are back on land again, cold, teeth chattering.

It ends with a slap of his hand to her nose _(crack)_ and her headbutting him right in the center of his face _(crack)_.

They reach up to touch the warm blood trickling down their faces at the same time and he croaks, cackles when he looks at her fingers and sees them as stained as his. Holds up his hand, bloody fingers and all, and stares her down. There's no need for him to say _See, we're the same_. She hears it anyways, slowly holds up hers.

She doesn't react in time to him taking her hand in his own hand, to him guiding her bloodstained fingers to his bloody nose so their messes combine. 

Her hearts are thumping loudly in her chest when she takes her hand back just as he starts guiding her fingers towards his lips.

He laughs again, like it's all a joke.

The Doctor gets up, wipes his nose and her fingers and starts walking away and towards where she parked her TARDIS.

 **“Get up, we're leaving.”** She shoots back and doesn't turn around to check if he's following but within her she can sense his amusement and his fiery rage dying down.


End file.
